I Can't Heal

Recovering from narcissistic abuse can feel impossible when your confidence, identity, and hope have been stripped away.

If you’ve been through narcissistic abuse, toxic relationships, trauma bonding, CPTSD, or emotional manipulation, this conversation will help you understand why the damage runs so deep — and why you are not broken beyond repair. Healing is possible, and you do not have to do it alone.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Listen, I want you to do me a favor. If you've had progress in therapy, you've had progress in your life, you've done someone's course, or you've done one of my courses, and you went from feeling absolutely terrible, fucking horrible, after a narcissistically abusive relationship, to feeling better or even more than better, can you please post in the comments below if it was uh through doing somebody else's work or a particular type of modality of therapy or or whatever, if you've gotten better, if you've recovered from narcissistic abuse, post it in the comments so that people who find this video and they're absolutely desperate and they're thinking, I'm never gonna recover, I'm never gonna get better. Write in the comments and say, This is where I was, really struggling, totally exasperated, totally overwhelmed, and this is where I'm up to now, and this is how I did it, and then offer them a word of encouragement and say, you can get better, because one of the things that the little tricks that the narcissist abuser plays is they sort of they erode the person, they erode our sense of self, they erode our confidence, and they erode our decision-making abilities. And once that job is done and that damage is there inside of the authentic self, and thanks to Darren McGee, we now know that we've also observed ourselves betraying ourselves because you did things in the relationship that you've never done before and you never normally would do. The target can end up just feeling really helpless and really, really hopeless, and like nothing's ever gonna get better again. I remember when I went through it, it wasn't like I it wasn't just heartbreak. I didn't feel like I'd lost a love. I felt like I'd lost the principle of love itself. I felt like I'd lost the capacity to love. I felt like I'd lost the interest in being in love. And for a period of time, I think I did lose the capacity to love. And for a period of time, I did lose my interest in the whole endeavor. I was like, well, if this is how painful and dangerous and awful it can be, what's the point? Why bother? So if you've lived it and you've gotten better, if it's come from one of my courses and you're like, oh, do this course, it's great, that's fantastic. But if it's come from anyone anywhere, or if it's come from watching YouTube videos, post it below and give people a sense of optimism that even if it really sucks, it can get better. Because if I say it, uh a number of people will believe me, but a number of people are like, well, he's incentivized to say it. He's selling products, he's selling courses on recovery from narcissistic abuse. Of course, he's gonna say, Oh, it was awful. What are the it's a it's a technique in um in sales and marketing. I think it's like it's useless now, but it was huge in the 90s. It was like the rags to riches story. And most no, in fact, it's not gone because most of your big um inspirational books that are written would be like, oh, I was a drug addict, and then I went to the Buddhist temple and found the amazing thing, and now I'm amazing, and you should listen to me, and you'll be amazing as well, isn't it? So it's changed, it's morphed to it, but it's still around. So people aren't gonna believe me, but random users on the internet who are speaking anonymously, what's in it for them? Why lie? Um, so please do that. The reason why I feel like I'm very, very hopeful now is because there's so much more information, even compared to uh 10 years ago, 2016 to 2026. There's way more information, there's way more people doing the work, there's way more people actively trying to find ways to help clients recover from narcissistic abuse and complex post-traumatic stress. Actively, there's just there's just more people at it. Um there's more people trying to solve that riddle, there's more people doing the work, and so we can see good techniques rising to the top through the crucible of people experimenting with it. I'm hopeful for another reason, but I'll come to that in a second. The first time I ever looked at narcissistic abuse, I hadn't really been in a truly pathological relationship. I'd been with somebody who was very vain and very selfish and very self-centered and quite cruel, but I don't think she was clinically diagnosable with anything. So I went and I looked, and there wasn't much information out there. So the majority of information, if you wanted to get it about narcissistic abuse, you had to go through the forums. Now there's tons of people talking about it. There's loads of information with uh qualified, credentialed clinicians backing it up. Um, there's more research that's being done on it. Now that's part of the reason why I'm more hopeful. But the bigger reason why I'm more hopeful that people can and will recover from narcissistic is because I've now myself, I've seen it in myself, whether you believe that or not. But I've seen it in so many other people, and I've seen it happen relatively quickly if the right tools are applied to the right problem. So it can be relatively fast recovery if it's the right tools for the right problem, the right solutions are applied to the right problem. And so um I see people from all walks of life, all kinds of different challenges, all kinds of different problems. But one of the things that I'm only really waking up to recently is the effect of community and the effect of doing it together. So you might have people from vastly different backgrounds, vastly different cultures, different geographical areas, different ages, whatever. But because there's this unifying principle of this odd, isolating experience of being narcissistically abused, and let's not sugarcoat it, a lot of people don't believe you. And I have compassion for the people who don't believe. Like if I hadn't lived it myself, I'd be a bit like, are you sure that's really? Or are you, you know, so I understand the cynicism, but I don't know if you know this, but but but some people put people who uh say that they're the targets of narcissistic abuse in a bucket next to people who claim they've they've been snatched by an alien and had something put up their bottom. You're next to people who I don't know, like tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists. Do you remember that Vice documentary I did years ago now? I think it was back in 2016. I did a documentary for Vice. Uh it it's it's up on YouTube somewhere for putting Vice Narcissism. Um, I was a major, major part of that documentary, and they cut most of me out because how this happened, I don't know. I shot with them like four or five times and they followed me around. They were being a little bit odd, and they were asking me to do some strange things when they would film with me. The thing that tipped me off was there was a group uh meetup in London, and at the end of it, the director was like, Do you want to hug the people who've come to the meetup? And I said, No. And he said, Go on, give give why don't we do a big group hug? And I said, No, I'm not doing a group hug. He said, Well, can we get some shots of you hugging them? I said, I don't normally hug people after a meetup, and I certainly don't do group hugs. So why are you asking me to do that? And then I did some uh nosing around, and and this is this is all true. You can you can look this up for yourself, it's verifiable. There was a series run by Vice called The Chosen Ones, and maybe I found it online, and maybe I found the director and the producer's name attached to a proposed series called The Chosen Ones, and it was people who thought they'd been uh snatched by aliens, people who thought they'd been attacked by vampires, vampires, I don't know, people who were deluded and they were the chosen ones, they believed themselves to be the chosen ones. And I remember going back and forth and saying to the director and the producer, if you dare put me and my people, the the followers who came to they they because they needed uh footage of me teaching a seminar, totally normal. They needed footage of me interacting with followers, totally normal. So these followers came and did meetups and did seminars and they filmed it. I said, if you dare suggest that they're paranoid conspiracy theorists, I will sue you. You you will be sued. You will be sued. No, it's definitely not in the chosen ones. And I had screenshots of saying, you've told me we're definitely not in the chosen ones, but I know through this other source that we are going, and that's blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Eventually they caved because they deceived me about what the purpose of the documentary was, and I had it all in writing, so you can sue for that. You can. Um, and uh, I said to them, okay, uh, if you if you do this and you frame it this way, you're gonna get sued. What they did was they just cut most as much of me out as they possibly could, and they presented it as a if if you watch that Vice documentary, they don't have this sneering, snarky uh look at these idiots. They think they're the chosen ones of the narcissist. They don't do that, they changed it. Uh, trigger warning, it starts with a really disturbing oil painting of Donald Trump naked. It's really gross. I don't know why they started it with that, but they did. So this is why, this is part of the reason why I'm so hopeful that uh people uh can recover because there's an impetus now. And I think as well, as people grow in confidence and in strength, and we all recognize that there's a problem, and we all become more comfortable saying it. So I'm comfortable going online and saying I was the target of narcissistic abuse. I was emotionally battered by uh a partner that I loved, not once, but twice. I've been through the ringer, twice. I've been on Satan's um merry-go-round two times now. So as the awareness of that raises up, and as people's confidence grows, I think it's going to be harder and harder for the narcissistic abusers to isolate people and convince them that that's what is not happening, which is great. So people will be more aware of uh and able to recognize that a pathological person is pathological, they'll be more able to recognize that they're in a relationship that has an asymmetric power dynamic and is fundamentally unfair and runs off deception and manipulation and double standards, and they'll recognize it, they'll go, Well, I'm not doing that anymore. Then, when they get the courage and the strength to rebel and to be dissidents and say, I'm not doing this anymore, and to leave, then there is a community for them. So, because of the way I am, I'm a little bit cerebral and I can be a little bit dry and I can be a little bit mechanistic. I didn't really so I was always like, what's wrong with the person or what's wrong with me? It's not that I treat you any differently than I would treat myself. The engines bust here, here, and here. So if we replace these parts, the engines were running, and it kind of works, you know, sometimes. But what people really need, because we're pack animals, we're we're tribal uh creatures in our DNA, is they need community and they need to be with other people and they need to hear other people's stories. I just ran a group coaching call the other day, and you can see the effect when people are listening to other people's stories, and they're sort of patiently present in an empathetic state, not in a sentimental state, but in an empathetic state, listening open to other people's stories. It does something to them. Now, of course, I want to take credit for that and be like, oh yes, uh, I did that because this is part of my amazing coaching. But it's it's not, it's a natural instinctive recognition. Other people have been through this, their story is different to my story. I'm a different gender, I'm from a different cultural background, I'm from a different age, a different generation, but the story still resonates. And then you invest. Instead of thinking about my story, I'm now invested in this woman from Idaho recovering from something that's nothing like what I experienced, but in its core mechanics is exactly the same as what I experienced. And this person from uh this young man from Russia who's got this problem and had this experience with his family, and his experience is not like my experience, but the core mechanics are the same. Do you see? And I think I'm gonna start maybe emphasizing more the community and the group element of the therap the therapeutic process, the coaching process that that yields therapeutic results. My final piece of advice would be um if you're a licensed therapist or a counselor and you're working in this area, do consider groups and and group sessions with people for reasons that are probably a little bit beyond my can. I think it accelerates the healing process. And maybe, maybe the maybe the reason something quite simplistic, which is narcissistic abuse isolates, it makes you feel like you're the only person on earth that this is happening to. Nobody can understand you and nobody cares. That's the narcissist's worldview being imposed on you. So then when you get with other human beings, even though they're different and even though they're not they're not like you in their experience and their manner, they've still been through the same thing.